Jonathan Lethem on the streets of Brooklyn

Cult writer Jonathan Lethem has called the Brooklyn he grew up in 'a geographical form of insanity'. He takes
Gaby Wood on a tour of the neighbourhood he has put on the literary map and explains why his new novel is about… Manhattan

Jonathan Lethem on the streets of Brooklyn

Cult writer Jonathan Lethem has called the Brooklyn he grew up in 'a geographical form of insanity'. He takes
Gaby Wood on a tour of the neighbourhood he has put on the literary map and explains why his new novel is about… Manhattan

Jonathan Lethem walks as he writes. I don't mean that he takes a break from writing and goes for a stroll, or that he thinks about what he'll write when he's pounding the pavement – though I'm sure he does both of those things. I mean that he does them at the exact same time. He has installed a treadmill in his office, moved his wireless keyboard to rest on its reading stand, and bumped up the point size on his desktop computer so he can see it while he walks.

His new working methods are the talk of the town – or at least the talk of Gowanus, the small, secretly hip enclave of Brooklyn where he shares an office with his former wife, the artist, writer and night owl Shelley Jackson. It's a little surreal to imagine him doing it – progress on the page matched by zero progress in space – but that only renders more graphic the extent to which an actual walking tour of Lethem's Brooklyn is a tour of his memory, and his mind.

Brooklyn is riddled with writers – so much so that Lethem's friend, the novelist Colson Whitehead, once wrote an essay joking about it ("Google 'brooklyn writer' and you'll get: 'Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?'"). But few have documented the place itself in such Dickensian detail, or with such manic, quick-witted, genre-loving energy as Lethem has.

Lethem, 46 next month, is one of America's best novelists, and indisputably its most skilled transubstantiator of urban pop culture into fictional worlds. He grew up not far from here, the child of idealistic bohemian social reformers (his father was a painter; his charismatic mother died when Lethem was 13). A youth steeped in comics, sci-fi and paperback noir made him the writer he is; in the same measure, perhaps, as these streets themselves. If his breakthrough novel, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) – a masterpiece of a mobster detective story whose hero has Tourette's syndrome – creatively mistook Brooklyn for a loud, involuntary, chaotic disorder, then his sweeping autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude (2003), brought to life its intimate, mutable questions of race and class.

I meet Lethem at his office on the corner of Union Street and Nevins. It falls between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, and south of Boerum Hill, all now desirable upper-middle-class neighbourhoods full of beautiful 19th-century brownstone or brick houses; formerly – that is, when Lethem was a kid – frontier country. Right here, affluence still meets a refreshing whiff of resistance. The building overlooks the Gowanus Canal, known to locals as "Brooklyn's armpit". The canal is a fetid environmental disaster zone, so devoid of oxygen and so obstructing of sunlight that no plant or animal can exist in it. In Motherless Brooklyn Lethem described it as "the only body of water in the world that is 90 per cent guns".

"We'll go this way," he says, and we brace ourselves against the bitter cold, walking up past the industrial buildings on Nevins Street and turning left into the quiet, remodelled brownstones on Dean. Lethem now lives, with his pregnant wife, Amy, and their two-year-old son Everett, in a one-bedroom walk-up rental six doors down from the enormous house people once thought his parents were utterly insane to buy. His father sold the house 20 years ago and retired to Maine. At that point Lethem was living in California and had no urge to return. "It had gone through too many changes and it had been a commune after all three of us kids were gone, and the house meant other things. It was just the house my dad owned, at that point. Now of course, just strictly in terms of real estate value, I can't help… they bought that house for 21 grand, in 1967. I mean, I could write that cheque right now."

Lethem runs up his stoop to drop off his bag, then stands back on the sidewalk, scanning the street. "So this," he says, "is like the Fortress of Solitude block." We take a few steps toward his old house, and look at the trees his mother planted as saplings. "This is where I grew up, where my mother died, and the site of most of the memories I processed into that novel or into the essays in The Disappointment Artist."

Lethem is not a novelist who doesn't know how his books come about, or who dislikes talking about the process. Indeed, he will graciously guide you through all of this in the kind of detail that would be called arcane if only it didn't refer to his own life – he behaves less like the author himself than the man auditioning to be Jonathan Lethem's literary executor. That posh paediatrician's office on the corner used to be the bodega where the children in his novel bought their Yoo-hoo [a chocolate drink]; this stretch of sidewalk is where his fictional alter-ego used to play the invented game of "scully". Before he earned a living from writing novels, Lethem worked in a series of second-hand bookshops. Now, if he weren't a fiction writer, he thinks he'd like to be a film historian or curator. And these two professions, the learned antiquarian and the nerdy precisionist, at all times haunt his speech.

He now knows, for instance, that Malcolm X's family was hidden at number 259 Dean Street after Malcolm X was killed. And he discovered, years after his mother took a copy of I, Robot from the shelf and more or less changed his life, that Isaac Asimov had lived at number 213 in the 1940s. But as we walk westwards, it's the 1970s that come to life.

"This whole neighbourhood has become centred on the kind of middle-class families that were just one very small minority element then," Lethem tells me. "So many of these houses were – it wasn't just that there were families of different races in them; there were different uses for them. There were boarding houses and boarded-up houses – abandoned ones.

"And there were also communes. Not just my parents'," he says, and indicates two other houses. "These were very active, thriving communes well through the 70s and the 80s. I remember who had the best parties. The communes all had their own flavour – 222 Dean was hardcore Maoist. And then there was 166 that was much more, you know, quasi-Black Panther, druggy, a little more American indigenous terrorist feeling to it. That was my favorite place. It was where I first heard reggae, for one thing. And it was where I first snuck a pot brownie off the parents' table, pretending to think it was just a regular brownie, even sort of to myself."

The dirty word hovering over all this is gentrification – "a Nixon word", as his parents saw it. The mother in Fortress of Solitude teaches her son to be proud of calling the neighbourhood Gowanus, rather than the nearby, more chi-chi Boerum Hill. But efforts to restore Gowanus to anything approaching glory were probably well-meant, since the place was elsewhere thought of as hell. As Lethem writes in a new introduction to his former neighbour LJ Davis's A Meaningful Life: "The dystopian reality of late-60s and -70s outerborough New York can be difficult to grant at this distance; these streets, though rich with human lives, were collectively damned by the city as subhuman."

As a teenager, Lethem left. He went to Bennington College in Vermont, thinking he would become a painter, and his contemporaries there included Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. He eventually wrote three novels before Brooklyn featured in any of them, and in the fourth, Girl in Landscape (1998), a child from Brooklyn Heights moves to the place where most of the book is set: Mars. Around the time Girl in Landscape was published, Lethem moved back to Brooklyn and Brooklyn moved into his work.

Still on Dean Street, we pass the homes of two writers: LJ Davis, the earlier chronicler of brownstone Brooklyn whose son was a friend of Lethem's; and Lynn Nottage, Lethem's friend from high school, now a Pulitzer-winning playwright. Lethem recalls a conversation they had about people they grew up with, and Nottage's conclusion: "Basically, if you grew up in this neighborhood you became a cop or a criminal." "Of course," he adds, "she was overlooking the third outcome. There's something about being here: because identity was so unstable, there are a lot of writers. It was very conducive to thinking about selfhood, and self-invention."

When I ask about his version of Brooklyn, Lethem replies: "I don't have a 'version of Brooklyn' – Brooklyn's too big. I didn't set out to write a great Brooklyn novel, or a Brooklyn novel at all. I set out to write the great novel of Dean Street between Bond and Nevins, on a certain summer's day in 1972. To think you're going to write Brooklyn is, for me, a pathetically hopeless position."

I wonder how the physical streets changed for him once he'd transformed them into fiction. Lethem smiles. "The first day I walked on Dean Street after finishing writing Fortress of Solitude – where, at some level, I think I wanted to exhaust the subject, a kind of torrential outpouring that would discharge the legacy of those stones, and everything I knew about that block – I thought: 'Oh, I didn't even touch it. I haven't even started.' It had completely slipped out of my grasp. Which didn't mean I was unhappy with the book, but the relationship between text and the completely intangible essence of this place, which still hovers between my body and the buildings and the streets – there's still a gulf between those things."

As we take a break from the cold, and wrap our hands around hot chocolates at Bar-Tabac, a popular restaurant on Smith Street, Lethem tells me about his latest novel, Chronic City. "It's a snow-globe version of Manhattan," he says. This shift across the river is such big news that his American publisher took out ads that read: "Lethem does Manhattan", as if that were all you needed to know. Of course, it's been received as an outsider's take, but Lethem says that's wrong. "To write about the place at all I had to be in a way very enraptured with it – and I am." The ferocious New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani dismissed certain surreal incursions of nature (a tiger on the loose, for instance) as whimsy, but Lethem says virtually all these stories were taken from real headlines.

What Lethem captures everywhere are forms of alienation – whether it's the white kid in a black school or the black kid driven by Marvel comics to caped crusades or a person with Tourette's. He's interested in the naivety of New Yorkers, the fact that when they go elsewhere, "as I did when I went to California, they don't know how to drive, and they don't really understand anything about America or very much else. They only can tell you, you know, what is and isn't right about Spike Lee's movies. They can seem very helpless or exotic creatures."

Back out in the cold, Lethem takes me down to IS 293, the middle school where he was treated so mercilessly that he devoted 250 pages of a novel to it. "This is a building of pure, cringing misery for me," he says as we edge into the empty, frozen playground. Around the side of the building is Court Street, the start of the Italian-American neighborhood he describes as "Motherless Brooklyn territory", now packed with pleasant coffee shops and expensive children's clothing. "It's so funny," Lethem says, "I feel these thresholds so strongly still in my body, although I don't think they mean very much anymore. But I mean, Smith Street was so Spanish, it was like going to another country. And then you cross this block and Court Street was so totally Italian-American. And just the distance of this one block is two worlds. So which end of this building you came out of was a difference of reality."

When Fortress of Solitude was published journalists would ask him if he was frightened to go here or there. "The assumption of the question was that everyone now knows that everything is totally safe. And I would say: 'Of course. And you, too, have places you don't go.' But then I realised that they didn't know it. So I would walk with them into the projects and I would see their body tense up – a block away from Smith Street. We stop thinking or talking or going to the thing that troubles us."

To illustrate the point he takes me back toward Nevins Street, to the Gowanus Houses, a set of 14 highrises built in the early 1950s. "So here we've just made a transition. We briefly touched the Italian Court Street and the yuppie Court Street and we've come just across the street here to where no one, over there, would ever go," Lethem says, and guides me to a particular doorway. "This is where the crack houses traditionally were, and a tremendous amount of dealing still happens right here." He laughs a little. "The cartoon people wanted to have, because it was a consoling one, was about how it used to be bad and now it's all good. But it's not changed – I wasn't writing about the past!" We walk through. "The cold is making this seem rather peaceful right now, and I don't ever encounter any difficulty walking through here in daylight, but I'll be the first to tell you I'm not going to walk through here at night. And this is where I live!"

An interesting experiment, he says, is to ask people who live on lovely, leafy Bergen Street where their nearest supermarket is, and they always think of the other direction – Smith Street or somewhere that way. But here on Hoyt we go into a supermarket that seems oddly camouflaged – by its low storefront, by its windows papered by special offer signs, by its position on a stretch of warehouse wasteland. Inside, the shop expands: up and back – it's a full-sized supermarket, and it caters specifically to the community that does know it's there: vast bright blankets of hammered beef, Puerto Rican brands of soda I'd never seen, but whose bottle tops Lethem used to use as a kid for his sidewalk games. Everyone is speaking Spanish. "This is exactly what all supermarkets looked like in the 70s," Lethem says. "That's what the reality of New York City is – this overwhelming chaos of lives that are parallel but not touching." It puts me in mind of a question asked by the hero's father in The Fortress of Solitude: "Is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?"

But Lethem is not a mourner for the past in the way that traditional Brooklyn nostalgists are – not wailing that people were friendlier back when things were cheaper and more dangerous, or that the Dodgers should never have moved to LA. He observes continuity as much as change. When I say, walking with him and thinking about what he's written, that it's interesting how the fabric of a city creates a kind of human fabric, he responds: "Yeah. I guess I'd call myself a kind of addict of that process. Because it's the unfinished quality that's surprising. Being able to come back here and feel like it was still alive came from realising that gentrification didn't mean that it was somehow sealed in amber now, but that frictions and juxtapositions are still being generated here." He coins a lovely phrase. The Brooklyn that he loves, Lethem says, is marked by "a definitive incompleteness".

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem is published by Faber and Faber. To order a copy at a special price with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847.